On attacking any Republican candidate

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Yancey Ward” has made the following claim on the Carroll trial thread, the gist of which I’ve seen for many years on this and other blogs:

And those who think the GOP can avoid these sorts of problems by dumping Trump and nominating someone else in 2024 are delusional. If it ever appears that DeSantis is going to be the nominee, he will be indicted somewhere for something, or have women spring forth from the woodwork to accuse him of rape, too.

There’s no question that any GOP nominee will be attacked. Not only that, there’s a lengthy history of sexual allegations against such candidates: Cain, Moore, and Kavanaugh, just to mention a few. And attacks are hardly limited to the sexual: remember Romney and the dog on the roof, the binders of women, and allegations of high school teasing.

However, the quote also introduces a strawman. Who thinks the GOP can avoid these sorts of problems by nominating someone else? I certainly am not aware of anyone on the right who thinks that such things can be avoided. We’ve witnessed such charges too many times.

However – and this is the basic point – for some candidates, such charges are more believable to the general public than for other candidates. The left is going to believe the charges – or pretend to believe them – no matter what. But the left was never going to vote for any Republican anyway. The charges are aimed at conincing voters in the vast middle to turn away from that candidate. And too many of those voters have already turned away from Trump for a host of reasons, including false allegations mounted against him. Some of those reasons, however, are his own fault, and mostly personality-driven. And the charges are extremely numerous and have had years to accumulate and marinate.

Would similar charges, or other charges, stick against other candidates? Perhaps. We can be sure they will be made, however. A nominee should be chosen with many things in mind, and among them are the baggage that person already carries plus the baggage we imagine will be loaded onto them by their opponents. Baggage is a given. How resistant to it a candidate will be is another question. Trump is already piled high with baggage, however.

Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their beautiful tails behind them

The New Neo Posted on by

Not Little Bo Peep’s sheep, but a peacock named Raul:

Freedom and fame proved fleeting for a fugitive Bronx Zoo peacock.

The runaway bird, dubbed “Raul” by local residents, wrapped up its life on the lam Thursday by flying back home after drawing a morning crowd of fans, reporters and zoo officials while perched in a tree at Vyse Ave. and E. 180th St.

The fowl’s two-day taste of feathery freedom ended quietly when Raul returned to zoo grounds at 11:19 a.m., one day after its escape. Police and zoo officials were pondering their next step in the strange standoff when Raul returned to his urban habitat.

“We kept an eye on the bird (Thursday) morning as he started to move around at dawn and fully expected him to return to the zoo as he did,” said a statement from the Bronx Zoo. “We had confidence in our knowledge of bird behavior to predict how he would behave if given the chance to do so without interference.”

Nice photos at the link.

Senility is the new “competent enough” – or, who cares whether or not it’s the president who answers that 3 AM call?

The New Neo Posted on by

John Hinderaker spotlights an email sent by David Leonhardt, the Times’s “senior writer” who writes for the paper’s daily newsletter. Here are some quotes from Leonhardt’s email:

Strange as it may sound, the American government can function without a healthy president.

At this point the contention doesn’t sound strange at all, because we’ve been treated to over two years of a Joe Biden presidency – although, of course, it depends on the meaning of “function.” The country has been going downhill fast, but to many on the left that’s a feature rather than a bug.

More quotes:

If enough voters are turned off by the idea of a president who would turn 86 in office, Republicans might win full control of the federal government in 2024 — and Donald Trump might return to the White House.

I know that it may seem crass for Democrats to worry more about partisan politics than the mental acuity of the country’s most powerful person. But it’s not entirely irrational.

It’s not the least bit irrational. The country is run by a combination of agencies and behind-the-scenes advisors and aides, and so Biden (who is not entirely senile at this point, by the way) is mostly a figurehead. I am convinced that a significant number of people voted for him in 2020 with the assumption that that was the way it would be. Most Democrats may think he’s too old to be president for a second term but that it doesn’t matter as long as Democrats are in control.

The E. Jean Carroll versus Trump rape/defamation case

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t followed the E. Jean Carroll versus Trump trial at all closely. You may not have followed it much, either. But plenty of people are following it with great interest, most of them hoping it will be one of many things to sink Trump and that GOP voters will nominate him despite it. The trial is taking place in New York – of course – and therefore it may be that the jury would convict him no matter how weak the case.

And it seems plenty weak. The plaintiff, Jean Carroll, alleged in a 2019 book that Trump raped her in Bergdorf Goodman some time in the mid-90s He denied it and insulted her as not being his “type”, and she’s suing him for defamation. Therefore it is a civil rather than criminal trial.

In addition, New York obliged her by passing a very special law enabling this trial:

The trial [which began] Tuesday stems from a second lawsuit filed in November 2022, alleging defamation and battery under New York State’s new Adult Survivors Act. The legislation opened a one-year window in which people who say they were the survivors of sexual abuse as adults could sue even if the state’s statute of limitations would otherwise bar their claims.

The law was signed by Hochul in May of 2022 and allowed people to begin filing six months from the date, with no limits on how old their cases might be. There is little doubt in my mind that one strong motive for its passing was to enable the suit by Carroll against Trump.

The statute of limitations aims to protect people from vague and ancient claims that are more difficult to defend against, in which details are forgotten and witnesses and records may have died and/or been lost. But hey, who cares about that, when there’s an opportunity to get Trump?

Here’s a little sample of the testimony in the current trial:

In one line of questioning, [Trump’s attorney] Tacopina sought to highlight an opposition to Trump by Carroll and her friends, as well as suggest they came together to make a plan.

“As soon as we are both well enough to scheme, we must do our patriotic duty again,” Carroll’s friend Carol Martin emailed her on September 23, 2017, one piece of evidence showed.

“TOTALLY!!!” Carroll responded in an email. “I have something special for you when we meet.”

Carroll testified she didn’t know what she meant in the more than five-year-old email by the words “something special.”

“This is an email … that I have no recollection of. I suspect it’s something funny. I can’t imagine what it is. I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t recall anything about this email.”

Of course not.

But I can certainly imagine what that special something might have been.

The case also is one of a newly-popular type of case in which an accused person saying that his/her accuser is lying about a crime is considered grounds for a defamation suit by the accuser. I find that unconscionable, no matter whom the defendant might be.

More here:

Carroll’s attorney used BOBS [“bring out the bad stuff”] masterfully during her testimony…She explained that:

She was flirting with Donald Trump prior to the sexual assault.
The door to the dressing room was open while she was assaulted, but she was trapped by Trump, who weighed at least “100 pounds more” than her.
She did not scream during the attack—saying Wednesday, “I’m a fighter, not a screamer.”
She did not write down anything about the attack in her diary. She added that she never puts negative things into her diary.
She did not file a police report (saying that she was convinced by Carol Martin that she would be “destroyed” by Trump if she did).
She could not recall the precise date, week, month, or year of the attack (although she claimed it likely occurred in late 1995 or early 1996).
She is a registered Democrat.
Her book that described the attack had virtually no sales.

And yet – as with Kavanaugh’s accuser – plenty of people will believe this woman, and she’s got other (no doubt Trump-hating) friends who will testify that she told them of the rape at the time despite never going to authorities. Trump’s attorney’s cross-examination of her probably only increased the perception of her as a beleaguered, unfairly criticized, victim – who is being victimized again by this trial that she has so nobly and bravely brought. The defense attorney is in a double-bind in which, if he questions Carroll’s veracity, he’s just an abuser like Trump! And if he doesn’t question her veracity and sincerity, then the jury may indeed believe her.

Trump predictably – and in my opinion stupidly – has recently made things worse by various postings on social media that are critical of the trial and the plaintiff. Eric Trump also made some social media statements that the judge said were violations of the laws against influencing a jury. Is Trump his own worst enemy? No – but only because he’s got so many rabid and powerful and ruthless other enemies.

ADDENDUM: Carroll claims that quite a few people raped her.

The reasoning of the Democrats I know

The New Neo Posted on by

I found that the following statement – embedded in an article by Walter Russell Mead, that focuses on a different issue – encapsulates the attitude of so many of the Democrat voters I know.

Here it is:

We live in a singular century. Faced, apparently, with the possibility that the next century could witness either the extinction of humanity or the establishment of a global utopia, both our hopes and our fears tend to be larger than life. Political opponents are not just people with whom we disagree. They are people whose misguided views could destroy the planet. Do ordinary standards of political competition still apply when your opponents’ policies will destroy human civilization? Should they be allowed free speech? Should they be able to organize politically even if their electoral victories would destroy life on Earth?

Living in the shadow of the singularity changes the way politics and society work.

The attitude isn’t limited to Democrats. Many on the right share the apocalyptic vision (I do to a certain extent, but not as strongly as some). It’s just that the right has a very different take on the dangers, which boil down to the end of liberty and the rule of law, as well as the splintering of society into special interest groups based on categories of race and sex. Fears of these particular dangers are actually more of a reaction of the right to the Democrats’ attitude as described in the quote.

In addition, I’ve not yet met a person on the right who thinks that utopia is even possible, much less looming in the next century. The right is more inclined to think that dreams that we can actually achieve utopia are themselves dangerous. That’s my point of view, as well.

House passes debt ceiling law

The New Neo Posted on by

It has no chance of becoming actual law, but it’s the opening gambit in the usual tug of war on the subject.

Here’s an approving piece on the subject. And here’s a more pessimistic one.

I tend to think that these debt ceiling negotiations are always framed as GOP horrible: either inadequate (by the right) or cruel and reckless (by the left).

Heather Mac Donald talks about crime and race

The New Neo Posted on by

Most violent crime is intra-racial – that is, blacks mostly kill and/or violently attack blacks, whites mostly kill and/or violently attack whites. And the black-on-black violent crime rate is much much higher than the white-on-white violent crime rate. But the MSM and the left aren’t interested in those inconvenient truths.

But what of inter-racial crime, which is a much smaller percentage of the whole? Not only does the left and the MSM pretty much ignore black intra-racial crime, it concentrates instead on inter-racial crime. Regarding the latter, it would have people think that it mostly consists of white-on-black killings, much of it by authorities such as police. And to a large extent the left and MSM have been successful in this propaganda effort.

But Mac Donald tells some inconvenient truths:

If blacks kill at nine times the rate of whites in Kansas City but die of homicide at only six times the rate of whites in Kansas City, what makes up the difference? Blacks killing people outside their own race. That disparity applies to non-lethal as well as to lethal violence. In 2021, 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the U.S. were black-on-white—480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative…

To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.

This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime.

Whenever I write about the subject of black versus white crime, some commenters assert that black people are innately – genetically – more prone to violence. I do not agree. I think the problem is highly cultural. In this, I’m with Thomas Sowell (see also this). But that doesn’t make it any less of a problem.

More on Tucker Carlson’s leavetaking from Fox

The New Neo Posted on by

Fox’s actions regarding Tucker Carlson, and speculations on his future, are still big news.

And we still don’t know many hard facts about either. So here’s a roundup:

From Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

From Cockburn at The Spectator.

And Carlson himself seems to be in good spirits.

Ratings on Fox have fallen, as one might expect. Fox recovered nicely from the leavetaking of its two previous most popular talkshow hosts, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, and it did that by elevating Tucker Carlson, who turned out to be a big draw. Maybe they think they can repeat the process, but I doubt it.

No one seems to know – perhaps because it’s still being negotiated? – whether Carlson will be free to go to another platform or start something on his own, or whether there will be a do-not-compete component for a while. But that’s an important question, especially with the 2024 election coming up.

Legal education is indoctrination at Columbia and elsewhere, and has borne much fruit

The New Neo Posted on by

On the Columbia Law School curriculum:

Parents are paying $331,350 — or students are going into enormous debt — for what amounts to a three-year reeducation camp at Columbia to produce leftist social warriors who will, as Christian says, “upend centuries of legal traditions and institutions,” including trashing the U.S. Constitution, to usher in the Marxist, socialist utopia they think we should be. And just like the other schools we are examining, everything is centered not on training budding lawyers to analyze a legal issue and provide sound advice to a client or to serve as an effective prosecutor who can protect the public from dangerous criminals, but rather on convincing students that we live in a systematically racist, sexist society engaging in mass incarceration for political reasons.

Ah, but I already knew that, because I get a monthly magazine from my own alma mater, which is not Columbia but is of that ilk. It’s been that way for years and years and years – simply unreadable leftist tripe.

More about Columbia, where Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory courses are required as part of the first-year curriculum that forms the entire foundation of the law students’ experience. I hadn’t known they were required, but it surprises me not in the least:

Among the required courses for first-year students is “Critical Legal Thought L6173.” It teaches “critical approaches to the assertion of the law’s objectivity and rationality,” including readings that “cover Feminist and Critical Race critiques of law’s aspiration to objectivity and neutrality.” It is through that biased lens that what used to be standard legal courses like torts, contracts, criminal law, property, and civil procedure will be “examined.” Gosh, I never realized that the standard rules of civil procedure that govern how civil cases proceed in the courts and that are applied neutrally to all parties in a lawsuit were racially discriminatory.

Naturally, this will be followed by another required course, “Legal Methods II: Critical Race Methods: Practices, Prisms, and Problems L6130.” According its description, the U.S. “suffers from many forms of discrimination” and this course will examine the “interface between legal interpretation, lawmaking practices, and racial hierarchy,” focusing on intersectionality, historicism, anti-formalism, social construction, storytelling, and denaturalizing baselines.” No doubt knowing about “intersectionality” will help the school’s graduates file well-reasoned, well-written appellate briefs – NOT.

In that way the school encourages several things. The first is that applicants already probably self-select for leftism, at least to a great extent, and that serves a gatekeeping function in the legal profession, especially at its elite levels. The second is to strongly establish the idea that everything the law student will learn at Columbia about the principles and rules of the entire legal system is not about objective and fair application of the law, but about using the law to gain power for your side. If there is no such thing as objectivity in the law – and not even a striving after it as a goal – then the law is just a tool for the gaining of power for your side (hmmm; same theme as today’s earlier post below this one).

Critical Legal Studies arose in the mid-to-late 1970s and represented a war on the idea that objective principles exist in law or are possible or even desirable in law. Of course, perfect objectivity never existed in the law, but the rules were designed to attain that goal as best as possible, knowing that some flaws would always exist. Critical Legal Studies used those flaws to torch the whole thing and replace it with the idea that everything was about power. Once Critical Legal Studies had infected law schools and then the rest of academia in its spinoff Critical Racial Studies, it formed the mindset of generations of students who later became influential in the real world in an enormous number of fields.

If there are no legal truths or goals except power for your side, the defenses against tyranny crumble. If you want to learn more about how Critical Legal Studies took over, I highly recommend Beyond All Reason, which was written in 1997 by two liberal law professors who were alarmed by it. If you read it, I think you might be astounded at how much damage had already occurred by then.

In the comments today, “Brian E” has a relevant question;

Are we seeing more of this– the judge sanctioning not only conservative plaintiffs, but the lawyers representing them?

Does this work both ways?

Federal Judge in Missouri CRT Suit Now Going After the Plaintiff’s Lawyer

In that case, the Obama-appointed judge apparently wants to sanction the lawyers (for plaintiffs who oppose CRT training in a public school district in Missouri, by the way) because under Missouri law attorneys are not supposed to talk to the press if it might influence the case. The author of the piece concludes:

It isn’t as if this is the first time a lawyer in a high-profile case has talked to the press. But from the Left’s point of view, this was the “wrong” lawyer talking to the “wrong” press with a “wrong” point of view. And I would bet my next three paychecks that if the lawyers for the school district had opined in public, the response from the bench would have been crickets.

But that’s small potatoes compared to this (the article is from a year ago):

The left has developed a powerfully coordinated legal election effort under the leadership of left-wing lawyer Marc Elias. In recent years, he has successfully brought together a coalition of left-wing nonprofit groups to work in conjunction with each other on elections. It’s a brilliant plan considering the left now dominates much of the legal system to give him victories; in urban areas they have more judgeships, they dominate state bars which are responsible for attorney discipline, and they run the biggest, most powerful law firms.

The reason they have taken over state bars is because while conservative attorneys are more likely to have families and be involved in church, taking up much of their free time, liberal lawyers are not, so they have more time to volunteer and serve on state bars’ boards of governors and committees. The left also controls large law firms for similar reasons. Without family and church obligations, they can devote long hours to achieving required billable hours.

Now they’re coming after elected attorneys too. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who has been out on the forefront investigating election fraud, had 12 bar complaints filed against him and his staff by radical activist Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs over election issues. He beat them, but she will just figure out reasons to file more; continue to throw mud until something sticks. The Arizona State Bar is one of the most vicious bars in the country. I work as a reporter, and can rarely get comments for my articles from conservative attorneys in the state due to their fear of retaliation.

The State Bar of Texas is going after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, suing him for investigating election fraud in the 2020 election. Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to enjoin Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin for breaking election laws by implementing voting changes during the COVID-19 pandemic without the approval of state legislators. SCOTUS rejected his request 7-2 for lack of standing, a sign that it wasn’t completely without merit. So now the bar is alleging he violated a catch-all, vague rule of professional misconduct prohibiting “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”

Much much more at the link.